Friday, June 15, 2012

Fire Wings of Death

That title is the name of one of my son's monster drawings. My little artist is a 7-year-old boy who loves to draw - you guessed it! - monsters. Always. And this one, in particular, he asked us to scan and copy (just because he wanted to see the scanner and the copier do their thing), and when it came time to give the image file a name, he chose fire_wings_of_death.jpeg. Ha.

This is the guy.

Anyway, the other day I had this idea...well, actually I've the idea for awhile, but this week I acted on it...to add this "creature" to one of my paintings and see what would happen. So I took advantage of all of my "extensive" (not) knowledge of image transferring and started the process.

materials for the transfer

I printed the monster on my ink jet printer, got one of my backgrounds, and glued them together with gel medium. After a few seconds I started to peel the drawing off to see the transfer.

Revealing the image.

I had to spray some water and use the rag or my fingers to rub the rest of the paper off the background, leaving only the outline of the monster. Now it was finally time to start painting.

Image right after the transfer. Pardon the photo quality.

I started adding some blocks of color to really bring out the creature. Colors are hard, sometimes. The first color I used was the red on the outside of the drawing, only to then decide I didn't like it. I guess it was 'competing' with the subject a little bit...

Covering some of the background, but leaving some interesting areas untouched.

I ended up using with blues and oranges, mostly, and I was happy with the contrast. I also like the little bits of the original background showing on the final piece.

Final painting

My son was very proud when I showed him HIS monster in a painting! So cute! I think we're gonna hang it in his room.

Here are some detail shots:

All in all, it was a fun project. I enjoyed trying the image transfer thing. How about you? Any cool new techniques? Have you ever done image transferring? Share!